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Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Human microbiome project meeting (#HMP2010) Day 2 wrap up

Well, Day 2 is over now for the Human Microbiome Meeting. See my previous post for information about the meeting and about Day 1.

I enjoyed Day 2, though some things are starting to wear me down a little bit. In particular, the fact that the meeting starts at 8 AM, or 6 AM California time, has been really rough. I missed the first 1.5 talks today because of that. Not to organizers of meetings everywhere - don't start meetings so early. And don't have too many talks in one day. It is better, far better, to just have fewer talks, than it is to wear people out. Also not to meeting organizers - do not change the order of talks in concurrent sessions at the last minute. Very bad idea. Anyway - onwards.

As with Day 1, I think the best way to get a feel for the meeting would be to look at Twitter posts with the hashtag #HMP2010. Unlike what I did with my post for Day 1 I am going to put only my tweets below, not everyones.

Today was split up into one series of talks in the AM and then concurrent sessions in the PM. What lessons did I learn today? Well here are a few, with some overlap to those on Day 1 but that is OK by me.

Again - correlations ≠ causation. Those of you out there who do not get this should GTF out of science.

For statement "X manipulations of microbes help treat X ailments in X people X of the time": X="some" NOT "all"

Seems like we are really on the cusp of publications of 100s of clinical studies of microbes and their association with health status

Some of these studies are even starting to get at causation

It should be remembered that all of the methods used in microbiome studies are just methods; none are per se better than others; it is the science that should be judged not the tools themselves

With some effort it seems one can culture many more organisms from a system than might be expected

Cultures have many many uses

But culture based studies do not really get at population genetic frequencies and relative abundance information very well

Be wary of those who stick relentlessly with one idea or method

Very strange how few pharma reps there were here (more on this in my next post)

Please please please do not confuse data with knowledge. Data can be very very useful and I completely support some projects that just are focused on generating data sets. But knowledge comes from thinking about the data, and carefully analyzing it.

Microbes, I think, run our lives much more than we would like to believe

Anyway - that is a brief update. Back to preparing my talk for later this AM ...